"Success favors businesses that see around the bend before others."
Jared Brown graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. In 2012 he co-founded a time tracking and workforce management company called Hubstaff. Headquartered in Indiana, United States, the company has grown into a global organization.
Today, over 95,000 businesses benefit from Hubstaff’s solutions, and media outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have covered its success. Jared has appeared on CNBC and the Today Show, as well as on podcasts such as Done! and Entrepreneurs on Fire. He shares thought leadership on remote work and managing a workforce of software developers on the Hubstaff blog.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Jared Brown: I’m excited to have the opportunity to share what I’ve learned with your audience. Thank you for having me.
My name is Jared Brown. I’m the CEO of Hubstaff, a workforce software solution that helps companies manage remote, hybrid, and in-house staff effectively, enabling team members to have their most productive work day.
From a young age, I wanted to build a software business. When I was 14 years old, I got hooked on reading books about the history of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and other software giants. I was fascinated by how they were able to capitalize on using technology to make a major impact and build a thriving business. At that early age, I decided I would create my own software business.
It was a great moment of clarity because it allowed me to commit myself to achieving that goal. That decision led me to teach myself how to program, reading books in the back of my high school classrooms. I spent my free time building games and programming web applications in PHP, eventually earning a BA in computer science from Purdue University.
Along the way, I spent a lot of time evaluating businesses and software applications, which helped me hone the skills of picking a winning concept. That’s part of how we could get in early on the possibility of remote work and be ready for the unprecedented change that happened in 2020.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Jared Brown: Hubstaff shows when people are working, if they are working on the correct things, and most importantly, how efficient they are.
There are lots of time tracking tools on the market. If that’s all we had designed Hubstaff to be, I don’t believe we would have gotten very far. The key differentiator about Hubstaff is that we show how people are working.
We do this through what we call “work telemetry data”. It’s all of the additional information generated while you work. It allows us to answer questions about how much time you spend in meetings, if you can block out distractions, how much focus time you have each day, and when you can get a significant amount of core work done.
In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Jared Brown: I’m most proud that we bootstrapped our business for the first 11 years with zero debt. Hubstaff was started with just a $52,000 investment from me and my co-founder.
We were what we like to call “customer funded” after that. It reaffirmed my belief that you can build anything if you have a solid product-market fit early on.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, are an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle to keep talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued, and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are you adapting to the current shift we see?
Jared Brown: We take employee engagement seriously, which you can see in how we’ve built our Insights analytics platform. It’s designed to help managers and leaders see changes in how their teams perform, allowing them to step up and offer support when people need it.
Internally, we apply that same focus through a few different efforts and programs:
Give people ownership. If you talk to our different teams, from product and development to support and sales, they’ll tell you they feel personally invested in what we do. By letting teams set direction, we get everyone actively engaged in everyone else’s success.
We have a great, welcoming culture. Part of that is our Hubstars program, where employees can thank and highlight the stellar work of fellow team members. The person recognized gets a small bonus, which we consistently see as a way for one team member to say “thank you” to another.
Have a clear mission with buy-in. We enable people to be their most productive as they work remotely. It’s direct and easy to understand while also being something that every team member lives because they are all remote.
Allow people to work remotely and as contractors. Flexibility is a perfect way to demonstrate that we trust people. I would recommend every company look into these options to ensure that their best team members can stay with them — and want to stay — no matter how their careers develop or what occurs in their lives.
Hubstaff has been remote from day one, and we have had to become very good at combating quiet quitting and the other issues that come up with distributed teams because of that focus. We don’t treat it as an afterthought but as the core feature of how we work.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Jared Brown: I wish we had put a board together sooner and worked on getting business mentors in different areas during our startup journey.
A board would have created more discipline earlier on and helped us prepare for the company’s adolescent stage. They can offer great strategies to ease growth and avoid some uncertainty common in different stages. Similarly, business mentors could have saved us the time of making some of the mistakes we did.
For the next quarter and beyond, we intend to improve our product for larger customers and continue moving upmarket. We have a strong solution for enterprise needs and will work hard to get our messaging out there.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Jared Brown: The remote shift isn’t going to change or reverse course. We’re in the “normal” that many businesses have wondered about returning to lately.
Remote work and the tools that enable it get a lot of press. We certainly have ridden this wave with great coverage and many different types of customers.
What I see as the next big wave is the rise of a contractor or fractional workforce. Hiring decisions will focus more on skills and capability than locations, hours, or titles.
Here is a two-fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Jared Brown: The High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. It’s exactly what it sounds like and is the closest thing I’ve encountered to a manual for software company founders.
Christopher Hitchens, an American journalist, is quoted as saying that “everyone has a book in them” Have you written a book? If so, please share with us details about it. If you haven’t, what book would you like to write and how would you like it to benefit the readers?
Jared Brown: I have not written a book. But if I did it would be the essential checklist for starting a software business. It would start with a checklist for how to evaluate and test your business concepts.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Jared Brown: The biggest hurdle facing SaaS businesses today is that the golden era has ended. Only the strongest software companies that are either profitable already or have a clear path to profitability will survive.
The challenge is that today there is more competition in every sector, and it’s faster than ever for anyone to spin up an idea into a business. You’ve got to be early, focused, efficient, and a little lucky.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Jared Brown: The sheer amount of effort it takes to execute. Too many would-be founders get infatuated with their concept and believe that is the key to success.
Having product-market fit is essential, but it’s easy for people to overestimate the importance of the idea and vastly underestimate the execution part.
It’s probably a good thing that potential entrepreneurs don’t understand upfront how much sleep they are going to have to give up and the sacrifices they are going to have to make.
2020, 2021, and 2022 threw a lot of curve balls into businesses on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past years, how can businesses thrive in 2023? What lessons have you learned and what advice would you share?
Jared Brown: Businesses that can look around the bend will always be the most successful.
It’s not about having a crystal ball but instead challenging the way you think about problems, solutions, the market, and improvements coming in other areas like personal technology. If you are doing business the same way as a decade ago, you’re not looking around the bend.
The past three years have seen the most significant tectonic shift in the business world since the advent of the PC. But there are a lot of businesses that didn’t have to react to this shift because they were ahead of the curve.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Jared Brown: I would pick the ability to see 10 years down the road. It’s incredibly challenging to predict the next big trend in technology. Having a 10-year head start is huge.
What does “success” in 2023 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Jared Brown: Success for me centers around leveling up myself and our team at Hubstaff. We’ve come a long way, but there’s always that next challenge ahead. We need to keep growing our leadership skills and our ability to execute at this stage of the business.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Jared Brown for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Jared Brown or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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